… goes to the Octavius Tower at Caesars Palace, which opened last month. It’s tucked far enough away from the casino floor to provide some mental lebensraum as well, and it has a dedicated check-in desk. Since it directly overlooks Caesars’ cluster of pools (potentially affording some R-rated views of topless bathers), how much peace of mind — in addition to prurience — Octavius will provide when “daylife” season begins is an open question. Last month’s shakedown cruise was a bit shaky, if you will. Rooms were generously supplied with bottled water and the obligatory ice bucket — but the ice machine on our floor wasn’t operational. Not all of the jets in the bathtub were working, either, and — given the displaced water pressure — activating the whirlpool function was like uncapping a fire hydrant. (Score one for Archimedes.) The beds are reasonably firm and we slept better than we had in weeks.
I keep hearing that Caesars Entertainment‘s target clientele for the Octavius Tower is the proverbial high roller from the Pacific Rim. A couple of random — and very out-of-place-looking stone dragons in the valet-parking oval fairly shout, “Hey, you Chinese folks! Stay here!” But you have to wonder if CEO Gary Loveman and (by implication) Palace potentate Gary Selesner have fallen out of step with the times or simply chose to finish up the tower on the (relatively speaking) cheap. To anyone who’s stayed at Encore or Aria or Mandarin Oriental or even the newer Hard Rock Hotel & Casino rooms, the Octavius Tower looks very derriere-garde, a hotel that escaped from a pre-Sheldon Adelson era of Vegas, right down to the “shat phone” in the toilet, enabling one to theoretically answer the call of Nature and ring up room service simultaneously. The bathroom itself is capacious without being (unlike Trump International, say) disproportionately huge. Whoever designed those misshapen condos at Trump obviously didn’t plan on living in one of them.
Seriously, were the rates comparable, I’d stay in one of Adelson’s 1999 Venetian rooms rather than drop good money on Caesars’ exceptionally generic new product. True, Harrah’s Caesars has sufficiently caught up with the times that Octavius rooms are kitted out with HDTV sets. (You still have to settle for cathode-ray tubes at Paris-Las Vegas.) Despite a large swath of Japanese- and Chinese-language channels, the overall selection is underwhelming. Caesars has also wisely eschewed those ridiculous remote-activation gizmos that run everything in your room except the faucet (gadgets that take longer to master than the ‘convenience’ is worth). The feng shui of its new accommodations — while very conventional — is better than Mandarin Oriental’s and the furniture is quite comfy.
But “luxury” isn’t an adjective that ever springs to mind — and certainly not at the $249/midweek that Caesars is asking for a room night. It’s more like an upscale Holiday Inn, which reminds me that sometimes no surprise is not the best surprise.
The decor looks almost identical to the Palace Tower rooms. Nothing exciting, but probably helps on the purchasing costs.
There was an unconfirmed allegation on the Sun’s Web site that CZR finished up the tower, in part, with material that was left over from other renovations it had done. If true, that would certainly account for having a sense of deja vu.
Mr. Mckee-
Well it looks like the Octavius Tower is finally finished maybe now Caesars Entertainment can start on Project Linq across the street which includes the “Observation Wheel”. By the way, have you heard anything recently about Howard Bulloch’s “Observation Wheel” across the street from Mandalay Bay?
Funny, I was just wondering about that and haven’t seen “boo” in the way of activity. Although I still think Bulloch has the better location, my money’s on Loveman to get started first … assuming either Ferris wheel gets built. Caesars has a short corporate attention span.